Clean hard drive

[lukey121]

I am selling my old computer on ebay but would like to clean the hard drive before I do this. Does anyone know of any thing I can download to do this with?

[Kev_UK]

You can format the hard drive. (wipe it clean). If you have a floppy boot disc, you can use ms-dos command, Format C

 

Otherwise do it when you have pc on using the tools that came with windows

[Mattk]

it will be harder to sell with no os tho

[peanut]

you could format the drive, but it does not completely  erase the info from the drive. what it does is make it so the computer cant find the info. to wipe the drive clean you need to fill the drive with zeros. unfortunately i have no idea how to do that but im sure if you ask someone here on AB or somewhere they could tell you. if you do not do this, someone who knows what they are doing could recover the information that you thought was gone.

[derekbobo]

With the CD your computer came with should be one to restore your computer to factory settings. This would wipe the hard drive cxlean but retain everything installed on the computer when you first got it. I agree with the post above, a computer with no OS isnt worth it, and may put buyers off.

DB

[bradleyy]

What is OS?

[lukey121]

All i want to do is clear the free space on the computer. ie: so no emails that I sent and then deleted can be read.

[LeMarchand]

http://www.heidi.ie/eraser/ - this free tool will overwrite anything you select (or all free space, if you want) in various patterns, including one approved by the US DoD for secure deletion.

 

However, if you have just deleted data in the past, it may have been overwritten with new data. As this old data has not been securely deleted, it may be recoverable.

[peanut]

bradleyy, os is operating system.

[Potatoman]

www.killdisk.com - this will boot from floppy, and totally wipe the disk - OS aswell, in the way that peanut says. And its free!

[Potatoman]

PS - all data will be totally un-recoverable, so use with care.

[scatman]

A lot data will be recoverable and it'll never be totally secure. How do you think the police find tons of things on PCs that people think they deleted?

Take out the H/D smash it up, replace with another (they're cheap nowadays) reinstall the OS and then sell on eBay :)

That is the only way you can be 100% sure you're not leaving anything behind.